Tag: DevOps

Containers run on Linux. Linux is containers. Red Hat has never been better positioned in the container market, but successful container adoption hinges on a lot more than software containers themselves. Improved software delivery — enabled by containers — requires changes to process, methods, and culture. Enter DevOps.

We are seeking open source enthusiasts to join our team — experts and evangelists who want to be at the cutting edge of how customers increasingly do business. Learn why the time is now to join Red Hat Consulting and hear from the team (you may soon be working with)!

At the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, we’re excited about the theme for this year’s Red Hat Summit, the Power of the Individual. It’s a theme that drives us on the Labs team every day as we execute on our mission to accelerate the delivery of our customer’s innovative ideas. A key element of our success to date has been to build and maintain a DevOps culture, which is why we’re presenting a session at Red Hat Summit called “The Open Innovation Labs DevOps Experience.” We’ll discuss the key behaviors and processes we’ve put into place, how we’re using tools like Ansible and OpenShift, and ultimately how this leads to an immersive experience we can offer to your team.

Back in the early days of “workflow” we had control of the transaction, usually a document, from the start of the process to the end. As IT evolved into the SOA/ESB era, we had a little bit less control but for the most part the process engine orchestrated everything.

There were frequent hand-offs to message queues but normally the message would come back to the process engine so it would continue to orchestrate the process.

The microservice world is different. Instead of having a process engine or an ESB controlling a small number of large services, we have many small services that can potentially send and receive messages or respond to events from any of the other services.

It’s more like a web. One initiating message or event to a particular service could affect the exchange of many hundreds of messages between the microservices before the initial request is considered complete. That can make BPM practitioners a bit uneasy due to the loss of control.

We may not have control any longer but we still can have visibility into the process. We can still apply our usual patterns for SLA and exception management, and human and compensating workflows. This can be accomplished through what I call a “tracking” process.

Business Process Management (BPM)-enabling software has been around for decades, having started as document centric workflow. It’s progressed into the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) age to become an orchestrator of services and human tasks.

Now, we see that the Service Architecture is evolving to include a relatively new concept called Microservice Architecture (MSA). That architecture along with enabling technologies like Cloud Services and Application Containers is allowing us to apply process management practices to solutions in a much more lightweight and agile way.

In the upcoming blog post series, I’ll be exploring the application of BPM principles to solutions that can implemented with MSA. In this first part, I’ll review traditional BPM practices and their pitfalls, followed by a guide to begin the convergence of BPM and MSA. re with MSA.

You can also learn more in the webinar I’ll be hosting on 9/27 at 11am ET.

In an effort to save expenses, enterprises think they can avoid training their teams. How does skimping on training truly impact the performance of the individual and the health of the overall organization? For IT leaders, these are critical questions that they must consider. What is the cost of a team without expertise?

Increasingly, as customers look to optimize their systems, design new solutions, or integrate new technologies, they seek the guidance, practical advice, and deep expertise to introduce new solutions. Day in and day out, our consultants are called on to draw from their experience in the field — across industry, vertical, business size, and region — to provide customers with the insights, practices, models, and plans that meet their needs and challenges.

Containers signify a new era of IT transformation — one that increasingly demands speed, agility, and transparency. But the path to realize the full value of containers can be complex because their implications are more than technical. Their inclusion impacts how people, across many different functions, may have traditionally understood their roles, and what they did in their roles (process).

Continue reading “Containers as a (DevOps) cultural catalyst, a field-tested adoption program to begin”